Practicum

I had the chance on friday to teach at Canyon View Junior High. We were teaching 8th and 9th graders. While I was there I realized that teaching things you are not interested in can still be fun. Personally, I do not plan on teaching multimedia, but being able to teach kids the basics of photoshop was really entertaining. There was a girl who was complaining about having to be in school when we showed up, but by the end of the period was saying that she liked the activities we had for them and she said she was excited for us to come back next week. There were a few kids who weren't into it and tried to play games online the whole time. By the end of the class it just didn't matter because of that one girl.

I thought that the discussion about charter schools was pretty good. I don't really like to debate at all so I didn't like that part at all, but the pros and cons for charter schools were interesting. I personally think that the USA has given every child in the nation the best possible opportunity for success through the public school system. I don't think that should change at all. But, if enough parents want to be that involved in their child's education, then I think they should be able to start a charter school. I think that charters are something that groups of parents want for their kids because they think its better than public schools. If this is what parents want for their child then I think they should pay for it as well. I don't think any money that a state has allocated for education should go to a school that is set up because of parents personal preferences. There are parents that home school their kids because they think its a better education but the state doesn't pay for that, the parents do. I think its the same thing with charter schools, parents should have to pay for it. Would this make charter schools only available to the extremely wealthy? At the start yes, because of the cost to build the school. After that the only cost would be the money for the students supplies. If the state didn't pay at all for charters then that would only make our public schools that much better. All in all if people want something different than what the public is giving them, then they should have to pay for it. 

I thought teaching at Foothill Elementary was pretty fun today. The things that I was most impressed with was that the kids were smarter than I thought they would be. The designs they came up with were pretty good for 6th graders. The other thing that I thought was really good was the way Mr. Larsen tied in what we taught the kids to what he was teaching them. They had recently learned about World War II, and he used the design principles we taught them to expound on all the propaganda that went around at that time. I thought that was really cool.

I thought the end of the book had a really good fact in it. In the study the teachers said they only thought they were asking about 25-40 questions per hour in their class but in the end it turned out to be they were asking over 100 questions in the hour. It made me think about questions and cues. We are suppose to use this tool as a way to spark the minds of the students to think and reason, but how many questions should we ask? These seasoned teachers are asking over 100 questions per hour, is that too little or too much? Could it be possible for a teacher to ask only a handful of questions to their class in one day and have just as much growth in the students learning? I think over 100 questions an hour shows that teachers are asking low end questions. They are not questions that are making the students think too much, they are more like yes/no or true/false questions. I think in the lesson outlines there should be a section where the teacher must write a few high end questions that are going to make the students think. The questions we ask our students need to be more of posing a problem for them to solve than just a yes/no question. 

I really was impressed with Chapter 7 of this book. I really believe in the nonlinguistical representions. I heard somewhere that 80% of communication is not with your words, but with the way you portray yourself (i.e. posture, facial expressions). I know that this chapter was talking a lot about making pictures and graphs for the students to look at. But I think another part of this is the way we act in front of them. If we act bored and tired so will they. If we treat a subject like it doesn't mean much so will they. If we treat the student like we dont believe they can learn the subject then they will start to believe it too. I think that once you are in the classroom or in front of students you need to act in such a way that you wont hinder their excitement to learn a subject even if its not something that you yourself are interested in.

classroom instruction that works

The thing that I found to be the most interesting in this book so far was the way analogies should be used in teaching a principle. The one they used was killing a tumor in the stomach by shooting radiation at it from all different angles. I thought it was very interesting that when the problem came up most people had no idea what to do about it but after the analogy of the army attacking a fort everyone knew what to do. I think analogies and metaphors are the most powerful way we can teach people because analogies help us form a connection with our audience on a personal level. If we can influence the people we teach on a personal level then the things we teach in the classroom will stay with them beyond it.

reading

I thought it was very interesting that this book started off with a statistic that says that schools pretty much do nothing for children and then goes on to try and prove that stat wrong. I'm sure it is wrong but still...I guess it did do the job of capturing my attention. 

I also wanted to write about the school I went to today. I went to Mr. Jorgensen's class at Timpanogos High School. Although all the students were doing was catching up on their work before the quarter ended I was really impressed with his organization skills. He has created lesson plans that are so thought out and structured perfectly that he doesn't have to spend his time scrambling around for something to teach or show the kids. The one thing I didn't like about his class was the fact that lots of the students finished the assignments and spent most of the period playing games. I really wouldn't care if my students played computer games if they finished their work and it was the last 10 min. of class or something. This was about 5 kids playing computer games for 45 min. of the class. I think if you have a few students that are catching on really well that is great and you should have something extra for them to do or send them on to the next assignment and give them a challenge.